Jeff Prestridge

It’s time for Tesco Bank and its rivals to up their IT game

Cast your mind back to Saturday, 5 November.

It is 8.30 am in Edinburgh and Tesco Bank boss Benny Higgins is sitting down to breakfast. The taxi he orders every weekend has picked up the papers from the local newsagent so he can flick through them over salmon and scrambled egg.

Higgins likes his taxis. He spent £18,000 swanning around London in them between March and October 2015. He also likes his reading. He’s a voracious absorber of anything from Robert Graves and F. Scott Fitzgerald to Raymond Carver. Hence the pile of papers.

Children flick in and out of the breakfast room – he has six of them. Life could not be better.

It is a lovely start to the weekend for the former Standard Life actuary who was paid £2.2 million in the year to March to run the challenger bank.

It is even better when he picks up The Guardian (not a natural choice for Higgins) and turns to the money section.

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